Matt Schneider
Design Leader, Mentor and Educator
Greater Philadelphia Area
matthewscottdesign3@gmail.com
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Building a Global Design Organization
Director, User Experience and Community
Nuix 01/2016 - 06/21/2021
A paradigm shift towards prioritizing user-centricity within our organization was initiated when I joined the company to establish and nurture the user experience (UX) practice, streamline processes, and form a cohesive team. Throughout this period, my primary focus had been to elevate UX and design thinking, making them integral components of our operations, and aligning our key initiatives with the broader corporate strategies.
In the early stages of my tenure, it became evident that a comprehensive redesign of the end-to-end customer/user journey was necessary. I embarked on this transformation by assembling our first UX/UI team, evolving from just one visual designer to a global team of 11 product designers. For the first time in our company's history, we introduced a strategy, process, and user-centered approach to our globally distributed portfolio of desktop and web applications. Our aim was to ensure a consistent and unified end-to-end workflow across all our applications, providing users with a seamless experience.
Over the course of five years, I meticulously planned, strategically positioned, and executed this transformative journey. While it was an ongoing process, we have already achieved significant, quantifiable enhancements to the end-to-end user experience during this time.
The following milestones highlight our company's progression towards delivering an intuitive, consistent experience that consistently delights our users.
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The Challenge
Our company faced the daunting task of managing a globally dispersed product portfolio that had been developed or acquired in isolated segments over the past 20 years.
Throughout this period, there had been minimal consideration given to the UI/UX or the overall end-to-end customer experience.
Initial stages of growth
At the team's inception, the UX/UI practice was integrated into our engineering teams. Starting from the ground up, we concentrated our efforts on our flagship suite of products, where the team embarked on the creation of our very first product style guide. This style guide aimed to provide a unified and consistent look and feel across our product portfolio. While it showed promising results initially, it became evident that this approach was not sustainable as both the team and our product range continued to grow.
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As the team expanded, there arose a greater demand for structured design processes and a consistent rhythm for collaborating with various business units. Leveraging the support of a recently established Agile practice, we formulated the company's inaugural Agile methodologies for the product and engineering teams.
In a bid to harmonize our practices, I patterned the newly created design team after the product scrum teams, instilling a sense of oversight within the emerging global design team.
Leading / Learning from our mistakes through growth
As the team expanded, our visual style guide also underwent significant growth. It became evident that our existing methodologies, while suitable for a single product, were not scalable when applied across multiple products and development teams working with diverse technologies. To address this challenge, we gave birth to our design system, a solution designed to provide our engineers with a consistent visual language employing the latest design practices.
An important parallel initiative
As the product experience team transitioned into the realm of design automation, I spearheaded the realization of the next phase of the end-to-end experience. Working alongside a team of graphic and web designers, our creative services team embarked on a two-year journey to reimagine the company's position in the marketplace and the services that envelop our products. During this period, we meticulously planned and successfully executed over 1000 design requests across the organization.
A Change in Vision
With a shift in our focus and vision, I reinvigorated the drive to accelerate the pace of the experience design practice. While the design system automation was making excellent progress and creative services were reshaping how our products presented themselves in the marketplace, I redirected our attention towards ensuring that the voice of our customers was consistently integrated into our initiatives. This led us to embark on the journey of establishing the company's inaugural customer data model and refining the processes for user research, inquiries, and focus groups.
A new approach to a user community
Our customers serve as our most passionate advocates. However, given the sensitive nature of our client's workflows and subject matter, maintaining consistent global engagement with them proved to be a challenging endeavor.
In late 2019, I took the lead in reimagining our dormant community as a means to unify the services and solutions surrounding our products, all aimed at achieving a seamless end-to-end user experience. Additionally, it provided the product design team with a valuable channel to connect with customers who were previously hard to reach.
The newly revitalized community has since become the central hub of user activity and knowledge. It's a thriving, interactive ecosystem where users, partners, and team members actively collaborate, sharing innovative ideas to address the most complex data-related questions.
This Community serves as a platform for fostering collaboration, which in turn fuels demand. This demand, in turn, creates opportunities by influencing potential buyers and driving product adoption. Ultimately, this leads to an expanded market share and increased revenue. The rejuvenated community is now the focal point of user interaction and knowledge-sharing, underpinning our commitment to providing a cohesive and enriched user experience.
In its first 6 months
1,000+
300+
3,500+
500+
150+
Interested Partners and Users
Companies and Partners
Monthly Page Views
User Generated Topics and Posts
Average Active Sessions
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